Amicus theory work, take 1

[raven]

Things I have learned in the last few days: never, ever commit a capital crime, and even if you never do, don't be black or brown (or anything other than white), because, let's face it, you're fucked. I have mostly been inclined to go home, dig up the Human Rights Act and love it and snuggle it and call it George.

This past weekend was the first of two training weekends being run by Amicus (an anti-death penalty group for which I do my currently precious little pro bono), and it was... well, kind of harrowing, actually. They did it over three days at Freshfields (and I was wryly amused to note that the letter I got instructed me to come in through the back door - i.e., in these hallowed halls, keep your scruffy pro bono arse well out of sight). I went down on Friday evening, and stayed all weekend, and it was worth it but I think I will probably need a long while to recover.

The keynote speakers were both people who had been wrongfully incarcerated, and taken off death row when later exonerated, and, my god, they were harrowing speakers. One of them, Sunny Jacobs, was the partner of Jesse Takfero - a man I had heard of previously as being the last person to be executed by electric chair in Florida, because they botched it and it took thirteen and a half minutes for him to die. Jesus god, what do you say to that? And how do you sit there while someone tells you this? I mean, I've written before about why I approve of Amicus, but having that happen to you for something you didn't do - yeah.

Amicus itself doesn't actually claim to be an abolitionist organisation - being a charity, it can't - but its speakers have no qualms about expressing their views, and I think it's possible to see two threads underlying people's thinking: there are the people who disagree with the death penalty on philosophical principle, and those who disagree with it because with its associated lack of due process, it is leading to unlawful killing. I'm in the first group, I think, despite some well-meaning person asking me over the weekend, well, yeah, but what if it was your family? What if it was your mum/friend/partner was got brutally murdered?

Which I have to admit is quite insulting in many ways - because, you know, when I go around telling people that I believe such and such a thing, I do actually believe it, I don't believe things merely when they're convenient for me. (And this is apart from how much I hate that style of argument - that "well, you'd feel differently if X happened" school. It's not about what I feel, it's about what I think.)

Anyway, that's a digression. As well as talking about the human implications of the death penalty, there was also a whole lot of factual information. I sat in a corner with my pad and paper and listened to lectures on the death penalty in general, how it has been enacted and abolished, how it fits into the American judicial system as a whole, what the Supreme Court thinks about it, why Justice Scalia is a scary scary man, and by the way has nine children, how it all fits in with European Convention on Human Rights, so on, and so forth. Surprisingly enough, I loved it. I mean, I really did. I'd had a week of school and was giving up my weekend, so I was expecting to at least yawn once or twice, but no: I sat there, took diligent notes, looked forward to the next sections. It was incredibly interesting. Mostly, I was struck by how the American judicial system as a whole is really weird. The appellate structure is incredibly convoluted, what they call a voir dire is certainly not what I would call a voir dire and the jurisdiction of the Supeme Court is kind of... strange. There is a thing called a writ of certiorari that I did not understand after much head-banging and have given up as a lost cause.

Again, though, I lapped this stuff up. I can't put my finger on why it is, but I really do love the law in all guises. And maybe, just maybe, I should have done it as my first degree. I know, no use crying over spilt milk or whatever, and I did like PPE: but I didn't have this quiet but all-consiming academic passion. I hated economics and I merely thought politics was fine by me. Philosophy I did love, but... still, I am thinking, maybe. If I could only have combined the two I'd have been happy. Philosophy and law equals jurisprudence, I suppose, and that's what the Oxford undergraduate degree is actually in, not law. Wah. I don't know.

Anyway, as a result, I am now doing that thing that you do sometimes when you are totally not thinking about something at all seriously and yet your browser tabs kind of belie you a little bit. I am (not at all) seriously considering doing an LLM, perhaps in the States. Obviously not any time soon - not in the next year or two - but still. Seriously considering. I mean, my LSAT score, while not essential for this sort of thing, is pretty damn good - it's in the median range for the sort of schools I might be interested in - and, I don't know, the websites are all pretty and talk about such interesting courses. (For example, Cardozo does an LLM in Comparative Legal Thought. How awesome is that? And they actually invited me to apply, last year, for their JD programme, which was a very nice compliment which I did not take up at the time.) And there are other places, with similar requirements and very interesting programmes, and just... yes. Sigh.)

Moving right along. I finished that day, amd jacinthsong and I had considered going to an Indelicates gig that night, but it seemed pretty clear that I wasn't up to it after I'd sat on a Piccadilly line train babbling incoherently about the death penalty in New Mexico, and apotropaios and lazyclaire came over and petted me a bit, and after a while I perked up enough to wrap Jon with toilet paper and take pictures. It was a very nice evening, actually, after a very long and quite difficult day - Laura wisely did not tax my brain, poured vodka into me and we watched The West Wing, which was very nice in general and particularly fun because I actually understood the bits about the Supreme Court.

Day two involved an actual case, complete with trial bundles and crime-scene photographs. It was also kind of horrifying, as again, it featured someone locked up for ten years for something they didn't do. The redeeming features were again, the fact it was breathlessly interesting, and also, the people I went through the case with were the sort of people who come to Amicus training weekends and were, as such, the sort of people I like. It was kind of fun to sit around and talk with people who, like me, don't have glorious shiny training contracts with glorious shiny firms, who actually are like me and like the substance of the criminal law, and like advocacy and individuals and just, nice stuff like that. It's always nice to know you are not alone. Afterwards, I didn't go home straight away but wandered around the city for a while, thinking about stuff. I suppose I have this to be grateful: I know what I want to do with my life. I really, honestly do. I just have to pull the whole bloody thing together.

I go back in three weeks for part two of the course, and am actually rather looking forward to it: I had no idea I would enjoy this as much, but I really did. I am looking forward, also, to being a grown-up lawyer some day, maybe, please. Because I do love it, and I'm really ready for something new.

Comments

[biascut.livejournal.com]

What if it was your mum/friend/partner was got brutally murdered?

gaaahhh! As one of my friends said, she wanted to disembowel the person who nicked her bag in a crowded club: that is the exact reason why we have a justice system rather than let victims of crime choose the punishment!

I'm so glad you're feeling the law career love! I am still feeling just a little jealousy, even though my job is implausibly good at the moment.

[loneraven.livejournal.com]

Law career love! It's about the only thing that's keeping me sane, at the moment.

[skipthedemon.livejournal.com]

The Supreme Court really is weird. Writs of certiorari are a strange legal crap shoot.

[loneraven.livejournal.com]

That's what I'm getting, and, er, not understanding. It seems so arbitrary.

[hips-lips-tits.livejournal.com]

there have been unnumerable studies showing that the death penalty does not act as a deterrent to future crime. we use it because people, not just americans, but people in general, on some subconscious level operate by the 'eye for an eye' theory of life. it doesn't do anything useful, really, except make us feel better that we got the bad guy.

on the subject of people wrongly accused/incarcerated/executed, i again blame that more on society than i do on the justice system. you'd know more about it than i do, but i am of the opinion that whenever a heinous crime is committed, people are not so concerned with bringing the guilty party to justice as they are with seeing someone hang, no matter who it is. (and we americans are very, very guilty of this. but it's not just us, although we may be the most brutal about it.) but, a lot of the world is like this in most respects, about a great many things. don't diet, take a pill. don't try to work through your problems, take a pill. having a spat with your spouse? leave 'em. .. etc, etc. no one wants to do anything that is going to take any amount of time or work to accomplish, they just want it done and to go about their lives and not have to hear about the nastiness anymore.

anyway. there's my two cents. :)

[hips-lips-tits.livejournal.com]

unnumerable? innumerable.

sheesh.

[loneraven.livejournal.com]

Absolutely, yes, that. Part of the problem I'm seeing is elected, non-tenured judges, who need to get people strung up or locked up just to keep their jobs. How there can be justice in that sort of a climate, I have no idea. But more generally: the thought that someone has to pay, regardless of whether it's the right person - yes. That.

[hips-lips-tits.livejournal.com]

it's hard, because, fortunate or unfortunate as it may be, i think most people do consider how they would feel if it was their loved one that had been a victim of a crime. which is a competely natural human reaction, i think, and you can't ever really say until you've been there. (which is not to say that you would change your mind about your beliefs, that's different. just saying that you would, possibly, for a fleeting second or two, consider hunting the person down and strangling them yourself.)

another argument for the death penalty, albeit a weak one, is that tax payers do not want to spend money on keeping these guys alive, and on death row. because honestly, some prisons are really nice. not that it's a vacation, but they've got food, shelter, a bed, and most of the time they work.. and that's more than a lot of non-criminals in america have right now. that upsets people. myself included. i don't know that i believe that the death penalty is the way around this problem, but it's definitely a source of contention.

[loneraven.livejournal.com]

Ah, but! New Mexico just banned the death penalty because it's expensive. It costs three times as much to execute someone than to imprison them for life without parole - because death row requires so much in the way of guards and solitary confinement, and because the right to appeal is always granted in capital cases, because, well, these guys are fighting for their lives. By the time the case has gone from the first instance court to the state appellate court to the state supreme court to the federal district court to the federal appeals court to the, possibly, Supreme Court - well. It costs a lot.

[speccygeekgrrl.livejournal.com]

I was discussing the death penalty on another person's journal two days ago. Weird.

Anyhow, I will say the same thing here that I did there: I do not understand how a group of people can be so forcefully anti-abortion and yet so forcefully pro-death-penalty, or vice versa. I won't fling the word "hypocrisy" around lightly, but it's very puzzlingly inconsistent.

I think I'm moderate-to-liberal on both points, because I have qualifiers to my support of both of them. On this topic, if the death penalty is going to stay on the books (and really, that puts America into questionable territory considering most of the countries that still have the death penalty), then it needs to be applied with utmost certainty about the guilt of the person, and NOT based on the race of the offender (or their victims, because I'm pretty sure that killing a pretty white girl doesn't get nearly the same sentence as other murders).

Then again, we can't even consistently or appropriately deal with other violent criminals, so... I don't hold out a lot of hope for the justice system being improved.

I think if I understood the law better, I might just want to cry about how it's applied sometimes here. >.>

[loneraven.livejournal.com]

Interestingly, the course I was on discussed race at quite some length. Apparently, there isn't a huge disparity between white and black defendants (in relation to the death penalty, not in the prison population). There are three times as many black death row inmates as there ought to be in proportion to the population, but there are more white people executed in terms of the prison population, which struck me as interesting.

The point they made, though, was the race of the victim: if they were white, it's eleven times more likely the defendant will hang.

[glaikery.livejournal.com]

At any rate. I'm certainly not a law student (yet, and probably not to be, though I saw a talk today that nearly made me want to be one in a couple years), but I have had this discussion in variations about the death penalty before, and

It's not about what I feel, it's about what I think.

I really appreciate this. What you said: yes.

I love to read things about that sort of quiet academic passion and excitement and browser tabs - because I love it when I feel it and because it makes me excited for the future when I see other people do ("o, but it is possible!" No, well...well, actually, yes). I think it might be a bit contagious all around.

Anyway - yes. Sorry to jump in on your journal. I wish you the best with all of this. :)

[loneraven.livejournal.com]

Thanks for reading! Yes... I wasn't going to be this sort of lawyer, to begin with. I just needed a job. And suddenly the whole thing came together and this sort of thing happened, and you're perfectly right about the contagion factor.

[tau_sigma]

Iona, how are you so shockingly interesting and caring and good and hardworking and just great?

I cannot say anything coherent, I am clearly supposed to be in bed, but oh, I do love reading your posts. And I am glad, and just a little bit envious, that you know what you want to do. But mostly glad, because someone should know what they want and where they're going, and you're lovely enough to deserve it several times over. I know it's hard to get there at the moment, but just the fact that you know what you want to do is a big help, I think.

Goodnight.

[loneraven.livejournal.com]

*smoosh* Thank you, dear, for your faith in me.

[macadamanaity.livejournal.com]

Cardozo does an LLM in Comparative Legal Thought.

Ha, does it?

I should warn you that they haven't actually offered Comparative Law as a course in the past two years and Comparative Constitutionalism was actually the most unpleasant course I have yet to have taken in law school, with the potential exception of Federal Courts, except I like the prof better in that, so even including it...

[loneraven.livejournal.com]

Heh! Believe me, if I do this for real, I will be pinning you down and demanding information like a sponge...

[pinkdormouse.livejournal.com]

Your brain is amazing. Although now I've got Steve Earle's 'Billy Austin' in my head, which is hardly the most cheery ballad at the best of times, never mind when I'm just waking up.

[loneraven.livejournal.com]

Thank you; and, apologies!

[pinkdormouse.livejournal.com]

No worries: it went away by the time I got to the stables. Please can I email you with a couple of questions relating to the Hindus In Space aspect of a story I'm working on.

[loneraven.livejournal.com]

Sure, do!

[pinkdormouse.livejournal.com]

Sent! I think I put enough background detail in for my questions to make sense.

Thanks!

[gamesiplay.livejournal.com]

The fact that you're out there being all progressive and public-interested makes me feel as though the world is a slightly safer place. Seriously. And it's wonderful to see you being so passionate about it.

Anyway, as a result, I am now doing that thing that you do sometimes when you are totally not thinking about something at all seriously and yet your browser tabs kind of belie you a little bit.

ahahahaahahahaha BEWARE. THAT WAS HOW I STARTED, TOO.

why Justice Scalia is a scary scary man, and by the way has nine children,

Scalia is freaking terrifying. Also rumored to be Sekritly Opus Dei. (Which, given what we heard through the grapevine at my brother's old school, is not all that far-fetched....)

[gamesiplay.livejournal.com]

PS: I feel that you should do your LLM at Cardozo or similar and I should do my PhD at NYU, and we can be next-door neighbors and rock NYC. Yes.

[loneraven.livejournal.com]

*grins* Having a purpose, yeah. It feels kind of awesome.

(Scalia is TERRIFYING. Seriously! His eyes are sort of slitty and evil. And I can totally believe any rumour circulating around the man, he inspires terror.)

(Also! We would so rock NYC. Whilst simultaneously failing at all of its public transport and eating establishments, which would be difficult but we'd manage it.)

[magic-doors.livejournal.com]

It's not about what I feel, it's about what I think.

That. Always, always that.

[loneraven.livejournal.com]

*nods* Yeah. Appeal to emotive arguments always irritates me, and I'm beginning to understand why.

[osymandias.livejournal.com]

'It's not about what I feel, it's about what I think.'

Yes, exactly. I'm sure I would feel differently, which is precisely why I think that my feelings shouldn't have anything to do with passing justice in such a situation. I was called inhuman for making that agrument :-)

I tend to go further and would say that I don't see any virtue in punishment at all. There's the deterrence factor, and there's a case of preventing others from harm, which might be served by incarceration, but apart from that I can't see how it isn't just a whole load of dignified language and pomp trying to disguise the fact that all that's being served is vengeange, the idea that you have hurt me and so you will suffer. Which just makes me very uncomfortable, really.

[amchau.livejournal.com]

I'm inclined to agree with you; I think that there's not enough focus in today's justice systems on the ideas of rehabilitation (of individual offenders) and of prevention (which has to apply to entire communities in all their complexity).

[osymandias.livejournal.com]

Yeah, prevention definitely seems the tricky one. To an extent there's some logic in isolating in some way people who have shown they're likely to be a danger to others, just because they're less likely to be a danger when they're thus isolated. Deterrence/prevention, on the other hand, seems far more nebulous. I can believe that instances of certain crimes would go up if there were no punishment associated, but there are others - dangerous driving, certain types of manslaughter, etc - where in general the convicted are no more likely to commit the crime again than anybody else, and there's unlikely to be any deterrence effect. So we have to wonder what purpose exactly is being served in locking them up. And one can't help but wonder also what could be achieved if the money that's currently spent on prisons and keeping people locked up was instead spent on exploring the deeper causes of a lot of the crime that goes on, and trying to tackle that.

It occurred to me earlier that even the language we have is intrinsically angled towards this idea of punishment: we have phrases like 'let them get away with it', which when you deconstruct them don't actually make a great deal of sense - I mean, 'it' has already been done, we haven't got any influence there - but are so ingrained in our ideas of how the world works that something like 'You can't allow them to get away with it' seems like an argument in its own right. Which is quite bizzare.

[amchau.livejournal.com]

Absolutely. There's a big difference between preventing re-offence (for which prison works to some extent, although describing it as 'isolation' seems problematic; it is isolation from one's original community, but guards and other prisoners still have contact with the individual), and preventing crime from occuring in the first place. Obviously, to prevent crime in the latter sense, you have to know what *causes* crime, and that's going to vary a lot depending on the specific crime. For example, 'being in a hurry' is one of the chief causes of speeding, and yet that seems hard to prevent unless you could impose relaxation courses for the entire population (which would also probably save the NHS money on blood pressure drugs, but is impractical and possibly so paternalistic as to be totally immoral). On the other hand, poverty, boredom, and lack of alternative options can be tackled in various ways, and might help with specific kinds of crime.

(A cynic might observe here that the best way to prevent all crime is to abolish the law, and they have a point to the extent that petty law-breaking (and some major law-breaking) can be caused by unfair or out dated laws.)

Your point about language is a good one; some ideas about revenge and retribution are so deeply embedded in our thought patterns that it's hard to even think alternatives. I wonder if these ideas are linked to the general concept of 'deservingness', as in 'they deserve what they get if they commit crimes'?

[loneraven.livejournal.com]

Punishment as a means for maintaining society, how about that? It's not as simple as a deterrent - preventing crime is part of what keeps our sociopolitical settlement glued together, so there needs to be a consequence-basis for the laws.

[osymandias.livejournal.com]

This seems a little bit of a case of begging the question. There are lots of things that provide some element of a basis or adhesive for our current society - that doesn't mean that they're good, and it's often the case that what we need to do is rewrite that society to remove them.

[dormouse-in-tea.livejournal.com]

It is so strange to realize that you undoubtably now know more about the death penalty where I live (New Mexico) than I do.

[loneraven.livejournal.com]

As far as I am aware, the death penalty is in the process of being abolished in New Mexico - and it has only executed one person since 1976 in any case.

[soupytwist.livejournal.com]

Who was it who said that there is a REASON we don't leave justice up to those who are hurt by the crime, and "but you'd feel differently if it was YOUR family!" is exactly it? Knowing me it was probably Stephen Fry. It's true, though - even the cultures where they do allow injured parties into the sentencing process, like with a lot of First Nations (and which apparently works really well, ridiculously low re-offending rates compared to most 'developed' nations), they don't just leave them to it and say "go ahead, take your revenge!" That is a really awful way for any justice system to work, even if it only ever dealt with people who DID commit the crimes they were accused of.

Um, by which I mean, my dad did an Amicus training weekend once and his brief description of it was very much like that, and so many hearts for you for it.

[loneraven.livejournal.com]

Justice and not revenge. I know there are people above arguing about whether there is a distinction between the two, but I really think there is.

These weekends are really, really wonderful. (Good on your dad, who presumably did not have a pro bono requirement to fulfill!) They're just... yeah. Really interesting, and also good for the soul.